


courage born of fear

by superfluouskeys



Category: Final Fantasy XIV
Genre: Duskwight Elezen Warrior of Light (Final Fantasy XIV), F/M, Female Warrior of Light (Final Fantasy XIV), Mutual Pining, Patch 5.3: Reflections in Crystal Spoilers, Unresolved Emotional Tension
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2021-02-26
Updated: 2021-02-26
Packaged: 2021-03-17 18:48:24
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,360
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/29721627
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/superfluouskeys/pseuds/superfluouskeys
Summary: "That's what it means to let someone into your heart, knowing full well that nothing lasts forever."
Relationships: G'raha Tia | Crystal Exarch/Warrior of Light
Comments: 10
Kudos: 34





	courage born of fear

**Author's Note:**

> I wrote myself a little comfort fic to cope with ugly sobbing about the physical DPS role quests, so I hope you will enjoy it also!

It’s a grey and chilly day in Mor Dhona. The gleaming spire of the Crystal Tower is all but obscured by fog, and G’raha Tia is, as has been the usual since his return to the Source, positively alight with energy. What a wonder, he cannot help but to think over and over again, to breathe in the crisp autumn air with ease, to jog or sprint or jump or fall, if it please him, and to scarcely feel the strain!

But his boundless energy is a double-edged sword, and G’raha does his best to stay busy. Truthfully, there should be more than enough to occupy his time. Though his mind remembers the talents he learned in the First, in the hopes that they might be of some use to the Warrior of Light when she arrived, his body is clumsy in its execution, and his affinity for magic is noticeably weak without the Tower’s influence. Though he did not leave behind any pressing engagements when the Dossal Gates closed, there are certainly people he can see and places he can revisit, should the mood strike him.

Yes, he does his best to stay busy. It would be no good, hanging around the Rising Stones as though he’d nothing better to do, falling overmuch into the rapturous orbit of his Champion like a lost planet set adrift in space and time, vying for her attention like so many others with nothing to offer her in return for her trouble.

The sky thunders ominously, and G’raha endeavours to keep his pace measured as he makes his way back to the Rising Stones. She’s been away in the First for a few days now, but there’s no telling how much time has passed there, nor when she’ll be back, so there’s no sense in falling all over himself to greet her upon her return. Better that he should find something worthwhile of his own to share with her when she does come back, he thinks, and means to spend the rainy evening doing just that before he stops cold just inside the door.

“My friend!” he cries, awkward and a little too loud.

Adrienne doesn’t look at him. “Oh,” she says thinly. “Hi, G’raha.” She’s got the contents of her backpack strewn across a large table, but she’s just picking idly at them, not making any discernible effort to sort through them.

Concern for her overtakes any sting he might have felt from her unenthused greeting. “Are you all right?” he asks, though he hesitates to move any nearer.

Adrienne sniffles. “It was raining in Norvrandt today, too,” she says by way of an answer.

“…oh?” G’raha finds himself at a loss. It’s not exactly that Adrienne never cries, but that she normally prefers to pretend that she doesn’t, to hide her tears and change the subject until her momentary lapse has passed. To see her in open, abject sorrow is shocking in and of itself.

Another sniffle. Adrienne picks up an ornamented bracelet and pretends to examine it. “Do you miss it?”

“A little,” says G’raha, carefully. How could he not, of course? But he doesn’t know how to tell her that—well, that she is here, and that he would go anywhere she went, if only she asked. He doesn’t know how to tell her, and she doesn’t need to know, anyway.

Nor does she need to know how often he wonders whether the people of the First miss him. Hardly anyone here in the Source even noticed his absence in the year or so his body has slumbered in the Tower, and those who did scarcely know what to make of him now. Sometimes he wishes he’d had just a bit more time to say goodbye to the life he’d built for himself in the Crystarium.

She’s dressed differently today, he notices suddenly, pushing such thoughts to the back of his mind where they belong. There’s a lancer’s arm propped up against the wall. “I’ve never seen you take up a lance,” he observes.

Adrienne lifts a shoulder indifferently. “Helps to learn different styles. The fellow I was helping in the First wouldn’t have benefitted from a mage. Gods,” she lets out a little chuckle, “I shudder to imagine it, actually.”

At last, G’raha dares to approach. “Would you…like to tell me about it?” he ventures.

Adrienne turns at last to look upon him, and there’s a surprising kind of hesitation in the set of her brow. She hasn’t even bothered to wipe the tears from her cheeks. “I would,” she says tentatively. “If you’ve not busy, of course.”

“Busy?” G’raha echoes stupidly. Then, feeling not a little pathetic, he schools his expression into something he hopes is vaguely neutral, and affords her a small bow. “Never too busy for you, my friend.”

Devastatingly, his words seem to evoke the opposite of the desired effect. Adrienne turns away from him with another quiet sniffle, and this time she does scrub her sleeve across her face.

“Adrienne,” G’raha catches onto her arm, his worry mercifully drowning out his own insecurities once more. “Please, tell me what’s wrong.”

She looks back at him for a moment, expression unreadable, fresh tears welling in her pale eyes. Finally, she nods curtly and returns her attention to her backpack. “Somewhere private,” she says, returning her things to the pack. “You know how I’d relish everyone seeing me like this.”

A touch of her usual wry humour heartens him significantly, and he moves to help her gather her things. “Shall we venture up onto the ramparts? I’ll grant, it’s a bit chilly, but it’s quite lovely up there when it rains.”

This, bizarrely, rewards him with a gentle laugh from Adrienne. “Ever eager to brood in high places, I see,” she teases him fondly.

G’raha rubs at his arm self-consciously. “We don’t have to—“ he begins.

“No,” she stops him, slinging her pack over her shoulder and reaching out to squeeze his arm with her free hand, “it sounds nice. I was thinking of just going to my room, but a bit of fresh air might do me some good.”

A very small and very stupid part of him quietly and _stupidly_ laments missing the chance to see her room in the Rising Stones. Not that it matters. At all. For any reason. He’d just simply—liked knowing how she kept her room at the Pendants, the way she left the bed unmade, the dishes she preferred to use, and the little personal affects she left around when at last she accepted that the room was wholly and forever hers to do with as she pleased.

It’s something he’s beginning to notice here, something her presence in the First could only hint at—that she doesn’t settle in, that she keeps everything she needs on her back or ready to be packed away at a moment’s notice. Not that he’s much different, he reasons privately, but there is a loud and insistent part of him that yearns to see her safe and happy in every way possible, and longs to be able to _do something_ when she is not.

It hasn’t begun to rain properly yet, but neither of them minds the chill. G’raha leads her halfway across Revenant’s Toll and up a winding staircase to a little ledge he’s discovered recently, high up away from prying eyes and ears, but still reasonably shielded from the coming storm. Adrienne mutters a few halfhearted protestations regarding his penchant for climbing, but she is far more surefooted upon the stone walls than once she might have been.

When they sit, she nestles herself against him, and his arm finds her waist on instinct. It wouldn’t be so unusual if she didn’t then take his free hand in hers and hold it between her knees. She often touches his face, his shoulder, squeezes his arm, all obviously friendly. Indeed, he generally gets the sense that she views him as something small and cute, not nearly as far removed as he would like from the two horrifying automatons fashioned after himself. And while of course he cannot help the occasional (well, perhaps near-constant) pang of longing for something different between them, he would never in a million years risk souring what exists between them now by entertaining such ridiculous notions with any degree of seriousness.

“So?” he prompts her, squeezing her hand without entirely meaning to.

“Hm,” Adrienne leans back against the stone wall, and consequently, further into him. “Where to begin? There was this Mystel boy in the Crystarium—well, I suppose _boy_ is a bit of an exaggeration; he must be twenty or more—“

G’raha promptly bristles, and is thereafter seized by the urge to slap himself. Just when he’s talked himself down from one proverbial ledge, he’s climbed up onto another.

She tells G’raha the story of the young man vying for her companionship with unrestrained fondness, relates the way his parents dismissed him with unmitigated sorrow, speaks of how she’d tried time and again to tell him the money wasn’t important to her, and isn’t it a shame, that he really thought that was the only way he could keep a friend?

G’raha hums his distant agreement until at last she moves onto the next part of her journey, and even still he finds he must force himself to relax. It is truly mortifying, far more so than merely hanging about the Rising Stones hoping for a moment of her time. What is it exactly that wounds him so? Adrienne goes out of her way to help countless people, and she is often moved by their struggles. She is warm and friendly with many others, and would speak of them in the same way. Indeed, she once spoke of G’raha Tia in much the same way right to his face, though she did not precisely know it at the time.

He was stricken by a peculiar pang of jealousy then, too, he remembers suddenly. Oh, to be young again, he had thought, and to know that the Warrior of Light remembered him fondly!

“I saw a vision of one of the original Warriors of Light,” Adrienne tells him at last, mercifully distracting him from his own miserable trail of thought. “I’ve seen others, of course, but this one was…different, somehow. I don’t know.”

She tells him the story of Renda-Rae, how she lost her comrades to a fearsome beast and swore revenge, and how an old story said she went off on her own to take it. She tells him how she, Adrienne, relived the experience as though it were happening to her, felt all that fear and guilt and terrible obligation as though it were her own, and how Renda-Rae had been struck down in battle, but her friends had come to her rescue. 

When she recounts that part—about the other Warriors of Light showing up to help—her hand flies to her mouth to stifle a sob, and G’raha holds her tighter on instinct.

“I’m sorry,” she breathes after a moment as she wipes away her tears. “I’m sure you’ve better things to do than listen to me whining.”

G’raha laughs gently, shaking his head. “You’ve said that twice now,” he tells her.

Adrienne glances over at him, surprised. “In my defense, I think you might be too polite to tell me to shut up and leave you alone,” she says with a smile.

The mere notion is faintly horrifying. “Or perhaps,” he says carefully, “the tale of Renda-Rae sounded a little too much like something you would do?”

Adrienne averts her gaze, abashed. “Perhaps,” she concedes quietly.

She hasn’t let go of his hand. In fact, she’s threaded their fingers together, and she brings her other hand to rest atop his as she continues, eyes still steadfastly downcast. “My mind tells me I shouldn’t burden you with this,” she begins slowly, “but after what I saw, my heart yearns to speak true.”

Entirely unhelpful as ever, G’raha’s heart flutters.

“I’m…quite afraid of losing you,” she says, her brow furrowing subtly.

“Losing me?” G’raha echoes stupidly.

Adrienne nods. “After everything, after—well. It feels like more than I could bear.” She swallows audibly, then looks up at him. “And of course I know you’ll want to go off somewhere eventually, and I’d never want to hold you back out of some—misguided sense of guilt or duty, just…”

She reaches out to cradle his face in her hand, swiping her thumb across the marking beneath his eye. G’raha is too stunned by her words to even begin to gather his thoughts.

“Just take care of yourself, all right? And if you’re ever thinking of doing something stupid and dangerous, because you think it doesn’t matter, or because you feel like you have to, just—“ her tongue darts across her lips in an unusual show of nerves. “Just remember that someone loves you, all right? And—and wants you to be safe. And would gladly share your burdens, if only you’d allow it.”

G’raha only realizes that tears have begun to stream down his cheeks when Adrienne’s eyes widen subtly and she wipes them away for him. “See, I suppose it’s good that I told you,” she says.

Everything G’raha can think to say sounds—insane, or just the slightest bit pathetic. “It seems you might be the one who needs to hear it more,” he says, instead. Her hand falls to the back of his neck, and the shiver that courses through him frazzles a significant amount of his self-restraint. “I’ve no intention of leaving,” he tells her truthfully, “until you grow tired of having me around, that is.”

Slowly, Adrienne’s lips curl into a radiant smile, and she pulls G’raha into a firm embrace. “Good,” she says into his hair. “Guess that means I get to keep you forever, then.”

The rain begins to fall in earnest then. Adrienne holds him tighter, and words fall from his lips before he has the time to think better of them. “I’m yours,” he breathes into her shoulder. “Always have been.”


End file.
